I think you just summed up the secret to success in life, really, is enabling other people to do cool stuff, and not being too proud about what you’re doing.
One of my personal heroes, so that’s good.
Is there any appetite for participatory budgeting? Is that integrated into the system together?
Is there good engagement with normal people?
Right. This is all at the city level, but not yet at the national level?
Very exciting. [laughs]
There are a couple of other things I wanted to run by you. One is that I developed a tool called the Lean Policy Canvas. You, as a ministry, must get involved in policy from time to time?
We’ve just translated into Traditional Chinese. Have a look at it. It’s at https://leanpolicy.org. You can look at it right now if you want.
The target audience is for people developing policies at the very early stage. I’m not a government person from way back. I’m a startup guy. Why don’t you download the Chinese one, actually? It’s bilingual.
Go down. So, yeah.
Basically, are you familiar with the lean canvas?
Basically, the lean canvas applied to policy development. It allows people to really rapidly work through, focus on the things that matter. What is the problem or opportunity that you’re trying to save? Who are the beneficiaries? What is the impact, before you start working out your interventions?
What I found was that people doing policy development, just like startup founders, they tend to focus on the product, rather than focusing on the problem that they’re trying to solve, or who they’re trying to solve it for.
It enables people to really rapidly sketch out policies, and use this as a discussion piece, either bring it further up the chain.
That might be something that you might want to consider using. It’s there on the site.
I’ve seen that one.
Yeah. It’s a bit more complicated.
It is similar, yeah.
If that’s something you’re interested in, that’s good.
Like Clippy.
If you can send me a link to that as well, that’d be great. Is that multilingual, or is it...?
That’s exciting. Also, if you go back to the Lean Policy website, Brenda and I wrote a document called the...
"...The Government Innovation Manifesto."
Oh, really?
To be honest, I’m not sure where it’s going to go, or what we’re going to do with it, but I felt frustrated at the time of working government. Just a lot of people within government didn’t really understand how hard innovation is, and what the constraints are.
It was a collective outpouring of support for the people that are actually taking risks and doing innovative stuff.
This was...
Not at all.
If you...
There’s always that risk that people are going to look at something, and just turn it into a ticking the box exercise.
Again, there’s a Google Doc. It’s there for anybody to do anything with if people want to contribute to it.
I read the blog post.
Oh, absolutely, yeah.
Either way.
We’re specifically looking for teams, but I can see the...
Yeah.
That’s really interesting.
That would be very cool.
Are you aware of other countries doing something like that?
It’s pretty disorganized, from what I understand.
I think Scotland are doing something as well.
I expect that to grow. That [the digitaln slack] only started a couple of weeks ago.
I think so, yeah.
The whole political situation, again, is, I just don’t understand it. I talked to my Ministry of Foreign Affairs. They said, "Oh, we don’t deal with Taiwan Central Government. We happily deal with the city."
There’s good stuff here. [laughs]
Yeah. To be fair, in a way, it forces you think that way. That’s a good way to think.
If things are starting at the local level, and then building up to the national level, I think that’s really healthy.
Good.
I think you don’t need to be official friends to be friends, anyway. [laughs] That’s good.
That’s good. Thank you so much for taking notes for me. [laughs]
